Why would you choose LMDE over the main flagship Linux Mint (Ubuntu)?

[MLED4]

On resource usage, using lmde 5 64-bit on an old* laptop, it's using just one gig of ram to run this browser window, the fan isn't making noise, cpu 49 degs, mobo 30, gpu 51

Code: Select all

sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null bs=8M count=100 status=progress
838860800 bytes (839 MB, 800 MiB) copied, 7.89342 s, 106 MB/s

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=8M count=100 status=progress
838860800 bytes (839 MB, 800 MiB) copied, 0.495206 s, 1.7 GB/s

[Distronaut]

You should definitely check out LMDE 5 again.

Got to the live session pretty quick and unlike early last year it did not lock up when I tried Libre Office or Firefox, something has been fixed. After a while I realised the fan was running and when I checked task manager (and I appreciate more resources are used in a live session) the memory was about 60% of the 2gb and the processors were at about 65 to 70%.

So a successful experiment.

I appreciate XFCE is lighter than Cimmoman but the difference surprised me.

Great that it worked better for you this time. I jumped ship from LMDE 5 for the MATE Edition last night, quite happy with it even tho I really like the Xfce Edition for my 12 year old AMD. It's almost as "light" as Xfce, first time I've tried out the MATE desktop environment, went with it because the Mint team is involved with MATE, and since I'm on Mint it made total sense in my mind... if I had a better computer I'd be using Cinnamon, something about the look and feel that I'll really like and enjoy.

I am sure I'll be back on LMDE in the future again and who knows maybe then it might be their flagship and with a MATE/Xfce edition.

[Tosh]

Great that it worked better for you this time. I jumped ship from LMDE 5 for the MATE Edition last night, quite happy with it even tho I really like the Xfce Edition for my 12 year old AMD. It's almost as "light" as Xfce, first time I've tried out the MATE desktop environment, went with it because the Mint team is involved with MATE, and since I'm on Mint it made total sense in my mind... if I had a better computer I'd be using Cinnamon, something about the look and feel that I'll really like and enjoy.

Last year when I was searching for a distro I really wanted to like XFCE but it simply did not work for me. On those non Mint versions it just felt dated, lacked a number of features I instantly missed and despite being a "lightweight" distro its resource use was no lower than LMDE Cinnamon. But when I tried Ubuntu Mate I immediately felt at home. Other than the "process failed" warning I got at startup I was sure it was where I wanted to be and as soon as Mint 21 was released I downloaded it, installed it on a new SSD and its on the Toshiba now. Not had a single issue, resource use is low just as it should be compared to Cinnamon. But when people continued to say how good XFCE was I decided to try it and how right they are. Mint have made XFCE what it should be, if I had tried it before Mint Mate I would be using it now.

Guess we are a bit spoilt and what suits one person does not suit another. All I know is that I would recommend Mint XFCE or Mate to anyone.

Typing this on the 15 year old Dell with Mint XFCE version. It really feels like a new computer. Amazing when nothing other than LMDE4 and Bodhi 6 would work on here last year and I gave up.

[Distronaut]

Great that it worked better for you this time. I jumped ship from LMDE 5 for the MATE Edition last night, quite happy with it even tho I really like the Xfce Edition for my 12 year old AMD. It's almost as "light" as Xfce, first time I've tried out the MATE desktop environment, went with it because the Mint team is involved with MATE, and since I'm on Mint it made total sense in my mind... if I had a better computer I'd be using Cinnamon, something about the look and feel that I'll really like and enjoy.

Last year when I was searching for a distro I really wanted to like XFCE but it simply did not work for me. On those non Mint versions it just felt dated, lacked a number of features I instantly missed and despite being a "lightweight" distro its resource use was no lower than LMDE Cinnamon.

Guess we are a bit spoilt and what suits one person does not suit another. All I know is that I would recommend Mint XFCE or Mate to anyone.

Typing this on the 15 year old Dell with Mint XFCE version. It really feels like a new computer. Amazing when nothing other than LMDE4 and Bodhi 6 would work on here last year and I gave up.

Another distro that is using Xfce and also looks quite nice out of the box that's been on my mind is Peppermint OS, and they ditched Ubuntu not long ago for Debian, but they also have a Devuan based one, which I know nothing about, no idea what the pros and cons are all I know that it's Systemd-free. PepOS might be something to consider when it comes to a lightweight distro, but you have to download and choose the browser/apps of your choice yourself, which is nice if you know what you want/need.

I ran Mint Xfce for almost 3 months, so I'll know how good it is. However have not used it in a while, a friend of mine is using it at the moment and she's having some problems regarding Xfce stopping the download in Firefox when ever she uses Screen Lock, told her to play around with the Xfce-settings but she has not figured it out yet (she lives far from me so can't just drive over and help her out), asked about that here "Firefox stops the download when using lock screen (Xfce Edition)": viewtopic.php?f=57&t=392041&p=2298075 any ideas maybe? Might just tell her to install the Mint MATE Edition, since I have not had that issue in MATE. Thing is she's using a old laptop so Xfce is perfect for her.

Bodhi I've seen a YouTube video about, has a interesting DE, Moksha, is it lighter than Xfce? Cool, that's the best thing about Linux that you can revive a old computer.

[Tosh]

a friend of mine is using it at the moment and she's having some problems regarding Xfce stopping the download in Firefox

Never liked Firefox. I use Chromium in Mint. In fact I normally uninstall Firefox as one of the first jobs after installing.

Bodhi I've seen a YouTube video about, has a interesting DE, Moksha, is it lighter than Xfce? Cool, that's the best thing about Linux that you can revive a old computer.

Bohdi is the lightest distro I have tried. Even the Appack version which has a full suite of software only uses about 220 mb of RAM when idling. It works very well once you get used to their way of doing things. The only thing that would stop me from using it as my daily driver is the simple fact the "team" has only 3 members and when one is ill development stops.

That also applies to Q4OS, another distro I tried and liked. They also do a 32 bit version with the Trinity desktop. But for the KDE 64 bit version with a small development team and resource use the same as Mint I could see no point personally. But it does have some interesting features so is probably worth a look, may be your dream distro.

[THN2000]

I am very happy with both LMDE and LM; i run them in parallel in two different partitions on my main machine, together with others (OpenSuse, Kubuntu, KDE Neon, SolydXK, Windows).

I have not been able to find any shortcomings in LMDE in comparison to LM. All my hardware is perfectly supported in LMDE. I am very happy to get very much the same user experience within LMDE without the depencies induced by the Ubuntu-based family of distros and the business model behind Canonical.

PS: well yes, one difference: I can remove old unused kernels in LM by using mintUpdate. In LMDE, i must do it by hand with apt.

T.

[Nuts2u]

To all you XFCE users, if you want to stay on Debian and use XFCE you might want to checkout SolyldXK. The have both an XFCE and KDE edition and I believe both 32 bit and 64 bit versions also. Link: https://www.solydxk.com/

[axisofevil]

To all you XFCE users, if you want to stay on Debian and use XFCE you might want to checkout SolyldXK. The have both an XFCE and KDE edition and I believe both 32 bit and 64 bit versions also. Link: https://www.solydxk.com/

But I want to stay on Debian and use Cinnamon on 64 bit and I am not short of memory.
So LMDE is ideal.

It's not such a big deal removing 5 packages a couple of times a year.

[Nuts2u]

To all you XFCE users, if you want to stay on Debian and use XFCE you might want to checkout SolyldXK. The have both an XFCE and KDE edition and I believe both 32 bit and 64 bit versions also. Link: https://www.solydxk.com/

But I want to stay on Debian and use Cinnamon on 64 bit and I am not short of memory.
So LMDE is ideal.

It's not such a big deal removing 5 packages a couple of times a year.

I'm right there with you axis...been using LMDE since v1 was sold as a rolling release. I was just mentioning to the users who wanted XFCE that they might checkout SolydXK. It just might meet their needs to running XFCE on Debian instead of a Ubuntu release.

[MLED4]

If installing the Mate desktop on LMDE 4 or 5, and if you want the cool mint sound icon rather than the not so nice icon from mate or wherever, you need to install or pin the mint icons from LMDE 3

[Tosh]

been using LMDE since v1 was sold as a rolling release.

Surely you realise LMDE is a free download just like any version of Mint.

[Nuts2u]

been using LMDE since v1 was sold as a rolling release.

Surely you realise LMDE is a free download just like any version of Mint.

Yep. Let me rephrase....been using LMDE since v1 was released as a rolling release.

[timbol]

My laptop with its 2015 motherboard much prefers LMDE5 to LM21.1, maybe its the difference between the 5.10 and 5.15 kernels?
It's got the same Cinnamon version so no visible differences. It's missing some little used bits like the Driver Manager but it all works and it's stable

[axisofevil]

Kernel versions would appear to have little or no influence over even the latest model setups.
There is nothing to stop you installing a backport of a later kernel version.

I did it once - and it made absolutely no difference.

[coconut catalina]

there are many reasons I would pick LMDE over mainline mint, the mane one is stability, ubuntu has recently been holding back a lot of core packages from updates lately which is not ideal, most of them security ones. second, with my experience using pure debian, I have not had it break on me and ever since lmde5 was released I've enjoyed using it and having the best of both worlds, the only thing that holds me back is this, since I am visually impaired, I find that mate is the most accessible desktop with screen reader support and cinnamon has a long way to go before it becomes usable with orca, sadly there is no mate eddition so setup is a long winded process, if you are really new to linux, I would just stick with the main line version, that said, if you later want to try debian, lmde is a great path

[Mia]

LMDE is Debian ready to use out of the box. In the original Debian, I need to edit system configs - in LMDE, all edits I need are already included. I prefer LMDE over Mint for the same reasons I prefer Debian over Ubuntu: it's the most stable distro I've ever seen with the best package management system I've ever tried. Ubuntu is not even in top-5 in both points.

[axisofevil]

I am a very long time user of LMDE.

I have tried Debian (in a VM) which admittedly comes with a Cinnamon DE, but lacks the polish of Mint/LMDE.
Perhaps its just me - but I find Debian to be very difficult on a Desktop.

As regards Ubuntu, it was going through its standard pointless user interface changes when Mint/LMDE first emerged.
Since Ubuntu had Unity, I wasn't keen on something that was partially built on Ubuntu.

My main PC has LMDE5; I also have a small netbook, not used much, that has Windows 7 + Mint 21.1.

[Burkhardt]

I started my Linux Journey with Mint 18 and have used it on 3 of my laptops ever since...
When I played around with simple Debian Server setups for home server tinkering, I found LMDE!

The idea peaked my interest - the fact that I can have a Mint desktop on a small server that has Debian as a base was great!
It seems to be much more stable than the Ubuntu variant of which I do not really miss anything not available in LMDE...
What started as curiosity, became a stable daily driver for me.


I've used it on my HP EliteOne (All in one Desktop) ever since I found it last year and haven't had any serious issues with it at all.
I mostly use it for Email, Browsing, Writing, Gimp-ing and a lot of other IT-related applications. It has never let me down and seems to be getting better and better! - Lots of respect to Clem (memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=2) and the Dev team for even doing this.
It is awesome and a safe horse to back if Ubuntu was ever to become problematic.

Much appreciation for the work already done and do carry on with the DEV please guys!

[medea]

My experience of using both is that LMDE just seems to be more stable (harder to mess up for someone who has limited skills to debug) and less demanding on resources (so runs a little more sweetly), especially on older hardware.

I originally installed Linux Mint Ubuntu in 2019 (after hating my first Linux encounter with Ubuntu proper) on a system with dual-core 2gb ram.
It seemed ok to start but as soon as I started updating and adding programs not already available, it really started labouring.
And when I then tried to resolve that by removing those added programs (hoping to get back the speed I had started with) the system didn't like it at all and kept throwing up errors.
For an experiment OK, but for a daily driver it was just too unreliable.

Then I tried Linux MX (which I found clunky and ugly).
Lubuntu (which seemed to be very picky when trying to add software, some it liked, others it just repeatedly refused to install).
Antix (lighter version of MX from same people) which was just too bare bones to use as a daily driver.

Having liked the Mint look and feel best, but not having a good experience with the Ubuntu flavour, I thought I would give LMDE a go, and I have never looked back.
That was on a dual-core 2gb ram, and I now have it on a 16gb ram system and it runs like a dream.

That experience gave me the confidence to finally commit to Linux for my daily driver going on.
In addition, that feeling (of having found a Linux system that seemed to be more forgiving/tolerant of new users trying to tweak things than the Ubuntu flavour), gave me the confidence to try experimenting with making changes to the OS.

Thanks to that, I can now dual boot Linux OS's, play around with gparted to get partitions just how and where I want them, adjust boot menu, etc.
Obviously not big stuff if you are a long-term hardcore Linux user, but a very big deal (and a huge liberation) if you are coming from windows.

LMDE just seems to provide a more stable base (I don't mind pay off of not being cutting edge), which beginners need in order to have the confidence to dare to take a risk or two trying a few new things, without fearing they will ruin everything just by trying.

That's my experience anyway. To paraphrase someone somewhen 'It's the stability, Stupid!'.

[axisofevil]

Partly the reason for stability is that you don't install PPA's or Ubuntu packages into LMDE - at least if you don't want a Franken-LMDE.
There are many Debian packages which you can safely install into LMDE.
Personally, I don't touch these non-APT packaging 'systems' - especially flatpak.

If you really need an unusual (non-Debian) piece of software, then compilation from source is always a relatively safe option.

Many years ago, I used Ubuntu, but grew to hate the regular (but pointless) user interface changes.